Should You Trust Midterm Polling?
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What is the expected error margin in current midterm polls?
There will be almost certainly error in the polls that we are seeing right now. That comes with the game. We should expect the average error in statewide races, like Senate governor in a general election is four or five points. So we should expect the polls to be off. I can't tell you which direction they're going to be off in though.
It's Thursday, September twenty-fourth. I'm Jane Coaston and this is What a Day. President Donald Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House today. The two leaders gave speeches during the arrival ceremony.
Shaw cinmo like kin dzia pięć. We should cooperate with sincerity. The interests of China and the United States are deeply intertwined, and there is plenty of room for us to work together. China US cooperation may not solve every problem in the world, but without our cooperation it would be hard to solve many of the world's problems.
I love a sentence so vague that you could read it in any direction. Anyway, Xi's visit comes as a new poll from the Washington Post shows that Americans' views towards China have improved since twenty twenty one, from eleven percent positive to nineteen percent positive this year. Sure, 54% of Americans don't approve of China, but more do than before, and of course, Trump loves China. But we don't live in China. Politico, MSNO, and CNN returned to the White House grounds today after a judge ruled last night that the Trump administration had to restore their access after Trump banned the outlets last week. Initially the Secret Service still wouldn't let them in, but eventually the White House relented.
And speaking of not controlling the media, it turns out that running a bad poll Is not fraud. A judge on Wednesday dismissed Trump's lawsuit, accusing the Des Moines Register and its former pollster of misrepresenting the state in the 2024 presidential race. The judge rejected the president's claim that the newspaper's poll coverage violated Iowa's consumer fraud law, because obviously it didn't. Calling the case extraordinary, the Iowa District Judge said that allowing the lawsuit and its faulty claims to proceed could have a chilling effect that, quote, can discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs, which sounds like what Trump had in mind the whole time. But let's talk some more about polls.
Like, why are there so many of them and what do they actually mean? Joining me as Galen Drew. Co-host of Crooked Media's newest podcast, Still Counting, to talk about what he's seeing in the polls for this fall's midterms. Galen, welcome to Water Day.
Thanks so much for having me.
Galen. I remember back in You know, thousands of years ago, say like twenty fourteen or even twenty eighteen. I don't remember there being this many polls for midterm races. Even just yesterday, I have seen Would feel like dozens of polls of races where I can't even begin to wonder how you're actually polling races that are this localized. So Am I wrong are there actually not more poles or are there more poles? And if so, why?
It's so funny that you ask me that because I actually just got finished recording another podcast, which I also host called GD Politics, and we had a listener question that it got exactly at this point. I didn't know the answer, so we had to go look it up. And we are in fact seeing more polling than we have in previous midterm cycles, what have you. What's the reason why? I think there's just a lot more people out there iterating. We used to live in a world where in order to conduct a poll, you had to pay a bunch of real people to get on the phone, open a phone book, and start calling real life voters. Now we live in a world where you can send people push polls. You can send I mean those are straight up fake polls where you like go on, I don't know, foxnews.com and they're like, who just won the debate?
That's a fake poll. That's not sort of anything that we would take seriously. But there's a lot of email polls, text message polling. There are a lot of different ways to reach people to try to gauge public opinion.
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